Rudy Giuliani on Technology

Former Mayor of New York City; Republican Candidate for 2000 Senate (NY)

Police the Internet, but don’t tax the Internet

Q: How would you police the Internet culturally, such as with predators & pornography?

A: I think it’s the new serious area of crime that’s emerging. First of all, let’s separate the economics from the safety and security, like we have to do with free
trade agreements; that we should not tax the Internet. There are people who are proposing taxing the Internet. That’d be a really, really big mistake. We should police the Internet in that we should make sure that child predators aren’t taking advantage
of the Internet. There are a lot of good state and local law enforcement efforts in that regard. I think a task force between the federal government and state and local governments, in order to police it, to share information--those are the kinds of
things that we have to do.

Q: Should we have an FCC-style agency for the Internet?

A: If it becomes worse--I’m not big on setting up new agencies. I’m sort of bigger on making the ones that we have work.

Lower taxes AND fix infrastructure

Q: Is this Republican dogma against taxes now precluding the ability of you and your party to come up with the revenues that the country needs to fix its bridges?

A: There’s an assumption in your question that is not necessarily correct; the
Democratic, liberal assumption: “I need money; I raise taxes.”

Q: Then what are you going to cut?

A: The way to do it sometimes is to reduce taxes and raise more money. For example, I ran a city with 759 bridges; some of the most used bridges in the
world. I was able to acquire more money to fund capital programs. I reduced the number of poor bridges from 5% to 1.7%. I was able to raise more money to fix those bridges by lowering taxes. I lowered income taxes by 25%. I was collecting 40% more from
the lower income tax than from the higher income tax. We should put more money into infrastructure. We should have a good program for doing it. But the kneejerk liberal Democratic reaction--raise taxes to get money--very often is a very big mistake.

NYPD & NYFD radio problems not confronted before 9/11

Long before 9/11, radios were a constant issue at emergency scenes. Too many people talking on too few channels led to system overload, and high-rise buildings’ structures impede transmissions. In the case of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center,
the inability of the fire department to communicate effectively was a major problem, so much so that it was pinpointed as such in an after-action report. Yet it was these same radios that firefighters brought to the WTC on 9/11.

In the interim, betwee
1993 and 2001 incidents at the WTC, a radio signal amplifier, known as a repeater system, had been installed within the complex. But in the same intervening years spanning the Giuliani administration, little was done by the city to try to upgrade
the fire department’s radio system. The difficult technical issue of providing repeater sites throughout the city so that firefighters could readily transmit and receive messages in all buildings and subways was never really confronted.

$90M cut in kid’s transit subsidy led to fare increase

Giuliani’s notions about the city’s finances undermined the fiscal foundations of the city’s subway system, so vital to New York’s economic vitality.
He reduced by $90 million the city’s annual transit subsidy that allowed children to take buses and subways to school without charge, expecting (correctly) that the state’s
Metropolitan Transportation Authority would pick up the expense rather than making kids start paying on their own. While this saved the city
$90 million, it also opened the way, politically, for the governor to reduce the state’s contributions to the transit system. The MTA had to increase its borrowing, dip into the fare box to cover debt, and eventually raise fares.

Interoperability failure worsened deaths on 9/11

Lost in the mythologizing of Giuliani’s actions ever since 9/11 was the tragic & all-too human story of miscalculations, mismanagement and disorganization. “A preponderance of the evidence indicates that emergency responders’ lives were likely lost at th
WTC resulting from the lack of information-sharing and inadequate communications capabilities,” concluded the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Its uncharacteristically searing report stated that just
50% of the emergency responders “heard radio messages calling for the immediate evacuation of the building. If communications were better, more firefighters would have been saved.”

The sorry disarray not only the chaos resulting from the attack, but
also the mayor’s failure to ready the city’ agencies for large scale emergencies such as high-rise fires. Interoperability, including well-coordinated police and fire departments emergency communications and protocols, were nowhere in evidence in NYC.

No privacy concerns with DNA-like fingerprinting

The opposition to DNA on the theory that it invades privacy, which comes mostly from the ACLU, is no more compelling that the opposition to fingerprinting when it was first introduced.

Source: 2000 State of City Address
Jan 13, 2000

Project Smart Schools puts computers in every classroom

More than 100,000 students now have access to computer technology in their classrooms as a result of Project Smart Schools. Every classroom will have access to computer technology by the year 2000. This public-private partnership
not only provides computers for our schools, it provides training for teachers as well. This is to ensure that all of NYC’s children can have the opportunity to acquire the skills they need to compete and succeed in the next century.